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To-Dos Delivered When You Want Them

Ever had something you wanted to show up on your to-do list weeks or months down the road? How about a recurring item you wished would be added automatically without you having to create a new one each time?

Here’s a quick tip: All you need is an app that let’s you add things to it using email and the calendar app on your Mac. It’s awesomely simple.

For example, you can create a note in Evernote by sending an email to your personal Evernote email address. You can create a document in Quip by sending an e-mail to share@quip.com. You can also create to-dos in Krumplr by sending emails to your personal Krumplr email address. Whatever app you use, you need to find out your app specific email address.

Now, say we have a presentation that is coming up in a few months and we want to have our to-do show up 3 weeks before the event. Here’s what we would do:

Create a calendar entry for the presentation.

Create an alert for the entry. Instead of choosing one of the predefined times in the list, choose ‘Custom…’. You can now specify that you want to be notified by email and when. Set the alert time to 3 weeks before the event and set the email address to your app specific email address (e.g. evernote-user.1abcd@m.evernote.com).

That’s it!

Three weeks before our presentation, the calendar app will send an email to our application and the to-do will magically show up there. At that point, we can review and prioritize it along with everything else.

If our presentation is a recurring one, say a quarterly manager presentation, we can use the same steps to automatically add our to-do every few months. All we have to do is set the appropriate repeat interval on our calendar entry.